I
THE Rev. Silas Eaton was dead.
It was May, and the little orchard behind the parsonage was like a
white and perfumed cloak flung on the shoulder of a bare hillside
which was, all the rest of it, rocky pasture. Under the trees, and
in the shelter of the stone walls, the grass was growing green. The
apple blossoms were just beginning to fall; in any breath of wind
single petals, white, stained outside with crimson, came down in
flurries, like gusts of warm and aromatic snow. There was a stir
of life everywhere. In the parsonage garden crown imperials had
pushed their strong stalks through the damp earth, and peonies were
reaching up long slender arms, each with its red curled fist of
leaves, reluctant to expand until certain of the sun. The ground
was spongy beneath the foot, and there were small springs bubbling
up under every winter-bleached tuft of last year’s grass. The air,
full of the scent of earth and growing things, was warm and sweet,
yet with an edge of cold--the sword of frost in a velvet scabbard.
Life--life: and in the upper chamber of the parsonage the master
lay dead.
One of the children had put a bunch of apple blossoms on the table
at the head of the bed. They were not appropriate--the soft, rosy
flowers beside the hard face there on the pillow; the face with its
thatch of gray hair over the narrow, domelike brow, seamed and cut
with wrinkles; the anxious, melancholy lips set in such icy and
eternal indifference--the face of the religious egotist, stamped
with inexorable sincerity, stern and cold and mean. Not a father’s
face. But his daughter had put her handful of snowy flowers on the
pine table, their little gnarled black stems thrust tightly down
into a tumbler of water. And then she went tiptoeing out of the
silent room. She heard her mother’s little, light voice downstairs
in the parlor, and Elder Barnes’s low, respectful murmur in
response. They were “making the arrangements.” Esther’s heart stood
still, not with grief, but with misery at the strangeness of it
all--her silent, meek, obedient mother saying what should or what
should not happen to--father!
“And, Mr. Barnes, if it will not be a trouble, will you find out
for me how much it would cost to send a telegram to my brother in
Mercer?”
Esther, leaning over the banisters in the upper hall, opened her
lips with astonishment. A telegram! It gave the child a sense of
the dreadful importance of this May day as nothing else had done.
The thought of the expense of it came next, sobering that curious
sense of elation which is part of bereavement.
“Mother oughtn’t to do that. It will cost--oh, it will cost at
least a dollar!”
This fifteen-year old Esther had a certain grim practicality, born
of a childhood in a minister’s family on five hundred dollars
a year. A dollar! And that uncle in Mercer, whom she had never
seen, who had quarreled with her mother because she married her
father, and who was so rich and powerful (according to a newspaper
paragraph she had once read)--this uncle, who had had no connection
with them in all these years--what was the use of wasting a dollar
in telegraphing him? She meant to say so; and yet, when she went
downstairs, after Elder Barnes had gone, and found her little
mother standing at the window, looking blankly out at the garden,
there was something in the mild, faded face that kept the girl
silent. She came up and put her strong young arm about her, and
kissed her softly.
“Mother, won’t you lie down?”
“No, dear; I am not tired. Mr. Barnes has been very kind in telling
me what must be done. I do hope everything will be as--_he_ would
wish.”
They did not speak for a little while, and then Esther said, in a
low voice, “Mother, I don’t want to worry you, and--and perhaps
it’s very soon to speak of it, but have you thought at all of what
is going to become of us?”
Her mother put up her hand with a sort of shiver. “No, no; not
yet. We mustn’t talk of that yet. Oh, Esther, he is dead! Poor
Silas--poor Silas!” She caught her breath like a child, and looked
up at her tall daughter in a frightened way.
Esther nodded and cried a little; then she wiped her eyes, and
said, hesitating: “You’re going to get a crêpe veil, aren’t you,
mother, and a black dress? And I think I ought to have a black
dress.”
“We haven’t any money for new clothes, Essie,” Mrs. Eaton answered
tremulously.
“But I think we ought to wear black,” Esther protested. “It isn’t
proper not to.”
The other sighed with anxiety. “I don’t see how we can. He would
not wish us to waste the money.”
They were very intimate, these two; for each had found the other a
shelter from the fierce integrity which had ruled the family life.
And now instinctively they nestled together, panting and chirping
like two frightened birds, and saying to each other, “_He_ would
wish this, or that.”
But he was dead, and the face of life was suddenly changed to them
both. The withdrawal of the dominant righteous will of husband
and father made an abrupt silence in their lives--a silence which
was as overwhelming in its way as grief. To the mother it was as
though having been borne helplessly along on some powerful arm,
she had been suddenly set down on her own feet, and bidden to lead
and carry others. Esther’s frightened question, “What is going
to become of us?” echoed in her ears like a crash of bewildering
sound. She had no answer; all she knew was that she must take care
of the children; work for them; fight for them--poor little weak
creature!--if necessary. She was thirty-five, this mother, but she
looked much older. Once she must have been pretty; one knew that
by the startled softness of her hazel eyes and the delicately cut
pale lips; but her forehead, rounded like a child’s, was worn
and full of lines, and her whole expression so timid and anxious
and deprecating that one only thought of what her life must have
been to cut so deep a stamp on such gentle and vague material.
It had been, since her marriage, a very uneventful life, its
keenest excitement the making both ends meet on her husband’s
salary. Before that there had, indeed, been the keen and exciting
experience of marrying in opposition to her father’s command, and
being practically disowned by her people. She was Lydia Blair, a
girl of good family, gentle and dutiful, as girls were expected
to be thirty years ago--one of those pleasant girls who let
their elders and betters think for them, and are loved as one
loves comfortable and inanimate things. And then, suddenly, had
appeared this harsh, fiery, narrow New England minister, of another
denomination, of another temperament--for that matter, of another
class; and she had developed a will of her own and married him.
Why? Everybody who knew her asked, “Why?” Perhaps afterwards she
herself asked why--afterwards, when he became so intent upon saving
his own soul that he had no time to win his children’s love or to
make love to his wife. By the time he came to die, very likely he
had forgotten he ever had made love to her. He called her “Mrs.
Eaton,” and he was as used to her as he was to his battered old
desk or his worn Bible. But when he came to die, he lay in his bed
and watched her as he had not done these fifteen years; and once
he said, when she brought him his medicine, “You’ve been a good
wife, Mrs. Eaton;” and once, “You’re very kind, Lily.” But this was
at the end, and the doctor said his mind was wandering. And then
the end had come, in the spring night, towards dawn; and now he
was lying still, as indifferent to the soft weather, the shower of
apple blossoms, the two children whispering about the house, the
wife staring, dry-eyed, out into the sunshine--as indifferent as he
always had been.
Well, well; he was a good man, they said; and now he had gone to
find the God whom he had defamed and vilified under the name of
religion, imputing to Him meanness and cruelty and revenge--the
passions of his own poor human nature.
And may that God have mercy on his soul!